April 29, 2024

FOUR YEARS AGO TODAY IN THE ATLANTIC:

As Jon Miltimore of the Foundation for Economic Education wrote a year later: Today Is the 1-Year Anniversary of the Worst Pandemic Headline of 2020.

It’s a headline that certainly grabs your attention.

“Georgia’s Experiment in Human Sacrifice,” read the title of an April 29, 2020 article in The Atlantic.

Written by staff writer Amanda Mull, the story suggested Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp’s decision to reverse course on the state’s shutdown and lift restrictions on businesses was an experiment to see “how many people need to lose their lives to shore up the economy.”

The decision, readers were told, was reckless and deadly.

“Public-health officials broadly agree that reopening businesses—especially those that require close physical contact—in places where the virus has already spread will kill people,” Mull wrote.

Without the government to protect them, all Georgians could do is “try to protect themselves as best they can,” Mull said. But she concluded that, because of the way the virus works, another deluge of cases “could be inevitable.”

“[It] may be two or three weeks before hospitals see a new wave of people whose lungs look like they’re studded with ground glass in X-rays,” Mull wrote. “By then, there’s no telling how many more people could be carrying the disease into nail salons or tattoo parlors, going about their daily lives because they were told they could do so safely.”

To be fair, then-President Trump had similar fears as Mull when Gov. Kemp said he wanted to reopen the state:

In April 2020, businesses in Georgia were shuttered by government decree as in most of the rest of the country. Mr. Kemp was hearing from desperate entrepreneurs: “ ‘Look man, we’re losing everything we’ve got. We can’t keep doing this.’ And I really felt like there was a lot of people fixin’ to revolt against the government.”

The Trump administration “had that damn graph or matrix or whatever that you had to fit into to be able to do certain things,” Mr. Kemp recalls. “Your cases had to be going down and whatever. Well, we felt like we met the matrix, and so I decided to move forward and open up.” He alerted Vice President Mike Pence, who headed the White House’s coronavirus task force, before publicly announcing his intentions on April 20.

That afternoon Mr. Trump called Mr. Kemp, “and he was furious.” Mr. Kemp recounts the conversation as follows:

“Look, the national media’s all over me about letting you do this,” Mr. Trump said. “And they’re saying you don’t meet whatever.”

Mr. Kemp replied: “Well, Mr. President, we sent your team everything, and they knew what we were doing. You’ve been saying the whole pandemic you trust the governors because we’re closest to the people. Just tell them you may not like what I’m doing, but you’re trusting me because I’m the governor of Georgia and leave it at that. I’ll take the heat.”

“Well, see what you can do,” the president said. “Hair salons aren’t essential and bowling alleys, tattoo parlors aren’t essential.”

“With all due respect, those are our people,” Mr. Kemp said. “They’re the people that elected us. They’re the people that are wondering who’s fighting for them. We’re fixin’ to lose them over this, because they’re about to lose everything. They are not going to sit in their basement and lose everything they got over a virus.”

Mr. Trump publicly attacked Mr. Kemp: “He went on the news at 5 o’clock and just absolutely trashed me. . . . Then the local media’s all over me—it was brutal.” The president was still holding daily press briefings on Covid. “After running over me with the bus on Monday, he backed over me on Tuesday,” Mr. Kemp says. “I could either back down and look weak and lose all respect with the legislators and get hammered in the media, or I could just say, ‘You know what? Screw it, we’re holding the line. We’re going to do what’s right.’ ” He chose the latter course. “Then on Wednesday, him and [Anthony] Fauci did it again, but at that point it didn’t really matter. The damage had already been done there, for me anyway.”

The damage healed quickly once businesses began reopening on Friday, April 24. Mr. Kemp quotes a state lawmaker who said in a phone call: “I went and got my hair cut, and the lady that cuts my hair wanted me to tell you—and she started crying when she told me this story—she said, ‘You tell the governor I appreciate him reopening, to allow me to make a choice, because . . . if I’d have stayed closed, I had a 95% chance of losing everything I’ve ever worked for. But if I open, I only had a 5% chance of getting Covid. And so I decided to open, and the governor gave me that choice.’”

At that point, Florida was still shut down. Mr. DeSantis issued his first reopening order on April 29, nine days after Mr. Kemp’s. On April 28, the Florida governor had visited the White House, where, as CNN reported, “he made sure to compliment the President and his handling of the crisis, praise Trump returned in spades.”

Three years later, here’s the thanks Mr. DeSantis gets: This Wednesday Mr. Trump issued a statement excoriating “Ron DeSanctimonious” as “a big Lockdown Governor on the China Virus.” As Mr. Trump now tells the tale, “other Republican Governors did MUCH BETTER than Ron and, because I allowed them this ‘freedom,’ never closed their States. Remember, I left that decision up to the Governors!”

Curiously, Mull rather quickly got over her initial apocalyptic response, tweeting just a couple of months later: Atlantic writer who warned of Georgia’s human sacrifice by reopening says New York’s 8 p.m. curfew is ‘absolutely insane.’

But then, many on the left forgot their obsession with lockdowns, when, to paraphrase Martha and the Vandellas, the summer of 2020 was here, and the time was right for rioting in the street.

Posted at 7:14 am by Ed Driscoll

April 28, 2024

OPEN THREAD: I do it all for you.

Posted at 9:30 pm by Glenn Reynolds

THIS IS HARDLY NEWS: Taking the stairs may up the odds for a longer life. “Folks who regularly climb stairs have a 24% reduced risk of dying from any cause, and a 39% reduced risk of dying from heart disease, compared to those who always take the elevator, researchers found. Stair climbing also is associated with a lower risk of developing heart disease or suffering a heart attack, heart failure or stroke, results show.”

Of course, healthier people are more likely to take the stairs to begin with.

Posted at 6:00 pm by Glenn Reynolds

EVERYTHING OLD IS NEW AGAIN! Back in 1968, Paul Ehrlich wrote The Population Bomb, kicking off a whole slew of doomsday literature and documentaries, and similarly-apocalyptic science fiction movies from Hollywood that wouldn’t stop until the massive success of George Lucas’ Star Wars completely upended the American movie industry in 1977. Perhaps leftist “intellectuals” were simply driven utterly mad when Richard Nixon won the presidency in 1968; this 2010 segment of Matt Novak’s Paleofuture YouTube series gives a hint of the tone of the first half of the 1970s:

And with Trump showing surprisingly good poling numbers (insert the usual insta-reminder to eschew cockiness here), the Politico have dusted off their bell-bottom jeans, platform shoes, grown some groovy long sideburns, and is ready to boogie on back to the doomsday population trend! The Far Right’s Campaign to Explode the Population.

The threat, we are told here this weekend, is existential, biological, epoch-defining. Economies will fail, civilizations will fall, and it will all happen because people aren’t having enough babies.

“The entire global financial system, the value of your money, and every asset you might buy with money is defined by leverage, which means its value depends on growth,” Kevin Dolan, a 37-year-old father of six from Virginia, tells the crowd that has gathered to hear him speak. “Every country in the developed world and most countries in the developing world face long-term population decline at a level that makes growth impossible to maintain,” Dolan says, “which means we are sitting on the bubble of all bubbles.”

Despite this grim prognosis, the mood is optimistic. It’s early December, a few weeks before Christmas, and the hundred-odd people who have flocked to Austin for the first Natal Conference are here to come up with solutions. Though relatively small, as conferences go, NatalCon has attracted attendees who are almost intensely dedicated to the cause of raising the U.S. birth rate. The broader natalist movement has been gaining momentum lately in conservative circles — where anxieties over falling birth rates have converged with fears of rising immigration — and counts Elon Musk, who has nearly a dozen children, and Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán among its proponents. Natalism is often about more than raising birth rates, though that is certainly one of its aims; for many in the room, the ultimate goal is a total social overhaul, a culture in which child-rearing is paramount.

NatalCon’s emphasis on childbirth notwithstanding, there are very few women in the cavernous conference room of the LINE Hotel. The mostly male audience includes people of all ages, many of whom are childless themselves. Some of the women in attendance, however, have come to Austin with their children in tow — a visual representation of the desired outcome of this weekend. As if to emphasize the reason we’re all gathered here today, a baby babbles in the background while Dolan delivers his opening remarks.

Broadly speaking, the people who have paid as much as $1,000 to attend the conference are members of the New Right, a conglomeration of people in the populist wing of the conservative movement who believe we need seismic changes to the way we live now — and who often see the past as the best model for the future they’d like to build. Their ideology, such as it exists, is far from cohesive, and factions of the New Right are frequently in disagreement. But this weekend, these roughly aligned groups, from the libertarian-adjacent tech types to the Heritage Foundation staffers, along with some who likely have no connection with traditionally conservative or far-right causes at all, have found a unifying cause in natalism.

This just in: religious people seek to make babies! Speaking of which, the Politico’s long-form article feels much like a Bizarro World version of Mark Steyn’s America Alone book from 2006, which grew out of a lengthy Wall Street Journal and New Criterion article Steyn published at the beginning of that year headlined, “It’s the Demography, Stupid.”

Most people reading this have strong stomachs, so let me lay it out as baldly as I can: Much of what we loosely call the Western world will not survive this century, and much of it will effectively disappear within our lifetimes, including many if not most Western European countries. There’ll probably still be a geographical area on the map marked as Italy or the Netherlands–probably–just as in Istanbul there’s still a building called St. Sophia’s Cathedral. But it’s not a cathedral; it’s merely a designation for a piece of real estate. Likewise, Italy and the Netherlands will merely be designations for real estate. The challenge for those who reckon Western civilization is on balance better than the alternatives is to figure out a way to save at least some parts of the West.

One obstacle to doing that is that, in the typical election campaign in your advanced industrial democracy, the political platforms of at least one party in the United States and pretty much all parties in the rest of the West are largely about what one would call the secondary impulses of society–government health care, government day care (which Canada’s thinking of introducing), government paternity leave (which Britain’s just introduced). We’ve prioritized the secondary impulse over the primary ones: national defense, family, faith and, most basic of all, reproductive activity–“Go forth and multiply,” because if you don’t you won’t be able to afford all those secondary-impulse issues, like cradle-to-grave welfare.

Americans sometimes don’t understand how far gone most of the rest of the developed world is down this path: In the Canadian and most Continental cabinets, the defense ministry is somewhere an ambitious politician passes through on his way up to important jobs like the health department. I don’t think Don Rumsfeld would regard it as a promotion if he were moved to Health and Human Services.

The design flaw of the secular social-democratic state is that it requires a religious-society birthrate to sustain it. Post-Christian hyperrationalism is, in the objective sense, a lot less rational than Catholicism or Mormonism. Indeed, in its reliance on immigration to ensure its future, the European Union has adopted a 21st-century variation on the strategy of the Shakers, who were forbidden from reproducing and thus could increase their numbers only by conversion. The problem is that secondary-impulse societies mistake their weaknesses for strengths–or, at any rate, virtues–and that’s why they’re proving so feeble at dealing with a primal force like Islam.

Speaking of which, if we are at war–and half the American people and significantly higher percentages in Britain, Canada and Europe don’t accept that proposition–then what exactly is the war about?

We know it’s not really a “war on terror.” Nor is it, at heart, a war against Islam, or even “radical Islam.” The Muslim faith, whatever its merits for the believers, is a problematic business for the rest of us. There are many trouble spots around the world, but as a general rule, it’s easy to make an educated guess at one of the participants: Muslims vs. Jews in “Palestine,” Muslims vs. Hindus in Kashmir, Muslims vs. Christians in Africa, Muslims vs. Buddhists in Thailand, Muslims vs. Russians in the Caucasus, Muslims vs. backpacking tourists in Bali. Like the environmentalists, these guys think globally but act locally.

I eagerly await Politico exploring that topic.

Posted at 5:42 pm by Ed Driscoll

YOU ARE FUNDING CAMPUS HATE: Well, if you pay your federal taxes, that is. Open the Books dug into the federal spending database and found that, for example, Columbia University got $5.7 billion from the feds between 2018 and 2022. Harvard, Yale and pretty every other school that has allowed anti-semitic demonstrations in recent weeks also got in on the beaucoup bucks. Check out my latest column on PJMedia.

Posted at 5:30 pm by Mark Tapscott